


Aureate

by ShunRenDan



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Domestic Bliss, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Namixas, Romance, Twilight Town, domestic AU, epilogue compliant, shameless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:20:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28714200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShunRenDan/pseuds/ShunRenDan
Summary: He sketched her with his hands. He carved her hips with his fingers, felt her lips with each digit, tracked her hair with the pad of his thumb as it swirled down the side of her cheek. He worked on her for days, for weeks, toiling away at the smoothness of her skin as if it might save her from some terrible, Sora-adjacent fate.
Relationships: Naminé & Roxas (Kingdom Hearts), Naminé/Roxas (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Aureate

**Author's Note:**

> For a special someone.

Twilight Town felt empty in the days after Sora’s disappearance. It wasn’t dead — that felt like such a poor choice of words to describe such hutter and putter. The tram still rode in on weekdays and weekends both, but it was emptier than before. Hayner, Pence, and Olette were gone, off to find Seifer and his gang on some merry jaunt between worlds that Roxas felt too weathered to join them in. He offered them his well-wishes before they went, but his heart wasn’t in on the journey.

No, his heart was back home, stuck between cobblestone streets and winding walkways that led to goldwashed alleys and honeydipped verandas that spread out over the town proper. Folks still wandered aimlessly from one venue to the next like batter-dipped bumblebees, filling their bellies or their eyes on the next food or marvel from Scrooge’s new line of businesses. Le Bistro was one such attraction, and Roxas had to admit it was both a great place to eat and a great place to pick up some extra cash when he needed work.

The Little Chef was more than happy to pass him an afternoon of dishwashing, and Isa never minded having his company in the kitchen.

Xion came along with him every so often, and though he loved her company, it was often hard to pull her away for too long. She was a lot more adventurous than he was, and she left the world more often than she stayed. She was happy to explore, happy to be a hero, happy to help whoever she could. Lea was the same way, and now that they both understood the burden of being a Keybearer, they were all too eager to embrace it.

Roxas didn’t know how to feel about that. 

He didn’t feel right about what happened to Sora, but he wasn’t going to shout out into the cosmos to try and fix it without knowing what to do. More importantly, he could feel it in his heart — he understood that whatever Sora did, it must have been his own decision. They were too alike for it to be anything else. Sora must have taken a bullet for them, dodged some catastrophe by flinging himself head first into it. Whatever it was that ripped Sora away from them, he knew it was on his own terms.

Something told him that he wasn’t the only one who knew that. Naminé, he figured, must have known. She was too insightful not to know.

She was one of the few that hung around in the wake of Twilight Town’s emerging renaissance. While others left to go chart worlds unknown, she contented herself in the walls of the Old Mansion, pleased to drift like a waif and sketch whatever caught her eye. Some of the time, that was him. Other times, it involved something more natural, something found out in the forest. Something old, something new, something borrowed…

Naminé was just as much a mystery as any of Twilight Town’s other marvels.

He liked visiting her for that reason. She seemed so knowledgeable about everything, whether he’d ever mentioned it before or not. She seemed to know a little bit about anything he wanted to ask, and when she didn’t know, he liked seeing the look on her face while she figured it out. Her knuckle to her chin, she would ponder, silently, patiently, until she understood whatever it was that he needed. He had once watched her sit like that for a half hour while trying to find out whether or not birds had to fly south for the winter in Twilight Town.

When she was proven right, when they saw the birds fleeing at the end of the autumn with the rest of the ships leaving port, he also enjoyed the smile on her face.

He enjoyed the little things, the small hours, more than the big ones.

His favorite memories of “life after” were the ones involving her, the scent of her hair in the morning, and the sound of her breathing at night on the pillow beside him. More favored was the dull  _ thump _ of her chest and the whistle in her breath when she was sound asleep on his chest. He liked spending time with her, and sometimes, it felt like she also liked spending time with him.

Roxas rarely saw her in the company of others. Whenever he wasn’t around, he knew that she sometimes flitted through the markets, though invariably she would end up seeking him out whenever she went into town. She liked to bring him through the colorful stalls and the sideways streets, and sometimes she liked to sketch him out against some of the more beautiful scenery.

It felt strange, having her stare at him for so long.

It felt nice, to be able to stare back without judgement.

The first time he tried drawing her — a return on the many favors she granted him in their time together — was a disaster. She came out looking nothing like how he saw her, and his hands were so clumsy and — and she comforted him anyway, praising his work and his patience and giving him the same gentle smile she would have given him if he’d nailed it.

The second time, he tried a little harder.

He wasn’t sketching with a pencil by then.

Instead, he sketched her with his hands. He carved her hips with his fingers, felt her lips with each digit, tracked her hair with the pad of his thumb as it swirled down the side of her cheek. He worked on her for days, for weeks, toiling away at the smoothness of her skin as if it might save her from some terrible, Sora-adjacent fate. Day after day, he worked her soul into clay, and when he was finally done, he was so nervous to show her that he almost didn’t.

Clad in a smock and only a little taller than he’d been the summer of his birth, Roxas surveyed his handiwork with Isa at his side. Isa was the sharpest critic he knew, and if he didn’t like it, there was no way Roxas could be happy with it. Together, they stood in the twilight of the alley behind the Usual Spot, where Roxas’s statue stood before the couch. He was going to have to carry it to her garden somehow, but that was a problem for another day.

“It’s passable,” Isa decided, strolling around it with his fingers on his chin.

“Passable?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s perfect,” he admitted.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Her cheeks are a little rounder than that.”

“They  _ used _ to be a little rounder than that. They aren’t now.”

Isa tutted.

“I suppose that’s possible,” he eventually mused.

Just in case, Roxas rounded her cheeks a little more after the next time he saw her, and waited until the evening to show her the effort of his labors. He got Lea to help him carry the statue out to her garden, asked Xion to bring her into town so she wouldn’t see — almost got spotted anyway — and carefully laid it in the center of her backyard, which they took care to clean up. It took the better part of the afternoon to ready the grounds, but after a long day’s work, it looked more presentable than ever.

He knew she didn’t care about appearances.

He just wanted her to see herself like he saw her.

Naminé was a rose on an ivy wall: a river carved through the desert of his once stoic heart. She was a soft spot and he loved her for that.

When she returned to find him in the garden, the sun was setting harder than ever before. Twilight Town was perpetually drowned in the din of a honey glaze, but that evening, it was glowing. Blood orange, tangerine, and grapefruit bruised the cloudy sky and buried her lawn in a lush, forest green. Clouds parted the moment she stepped outside, showering the garden in a dappling of brilliant aurea and illuminating the statue’s pale skin in just such a way that…

For once, Roxas felt like he got it right.

“Ta-da!”

Lea hopped dramatically to the left and Roxas joined him, gesturing proudly to the monument he’d built her. Naminé approached it with her lips parted (he hoped that was as close to a “jaw drop” as she could get). Xion oo’d and aa’d behind her, shocked that the Roxas she knew could create something so lifelike. For what felt like an eternity, Naminé paced around the statue’s borders. Her fingers traced out the borders in her dress, played around the edge of what might have been fabric.

With a new sketchbook held close to her chest, she stole him with her eyes. “Did you make this, Roxas?”

“Do you like it?”

Naminé glanced back over at her likeness. Without the podium beneath it, she would have been taller by a hair. Roxas could see, in that moment, how imperfect it was in comparison to her. How the hair wasn’t as soft, how her lips were a touch more full — how she was so much more beautiful than he could ever have captured in a statue.

And then she smiled.

“Thank you.”


End file.
